Original article: www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson221.html
Writers on this page and elsewhere long have exposed the U.S.
War on Drugs for what it is: a fraud that has killed or destroyed
many more people than ever have been injured or killed by illegal
drugs themselves. This war has empowered the state and has led
to the modern phenomenon of the government home invasion, better
known as the "raid," which not only is a death sentence
to innocents, but kills liberty itself.
The intersection of the Drug War, police-led home invasions,
and race has made for the worst assaults on human liberty in
this history of this country. We can speak of the millions of
people either in prison, arrested, or having served time in prison
for drug offenses, the illegal drug-fueled gang wars in cities
that make daily life unbearable for law-abiding citizens.
After a while, unfortunately, the numbers overwhelm us and
make us numb. As Josef Stalin once said (in a cynical self-statement
about his use of mass murder), "One death is a tragedy;
a million deaths is a statistic." This article is about
a single death and another life destroyed as the Drug War, a
police home invasion, and the politics of race have come together
in a very bad way to effectively end the life of a young black
man. It also is about the very real fraud that prosecutors perpetrate
almost daily in their quest to fill prisons, many times with
innocent people.
At this time, Cory Maye is serving life imprisonment in Mississippi
for shooting to death Officer Ron Jones of Prentiss early in
the morning of December 26, 2001. Maye had been on death row
until a judge overturned the death sentence and gave him life
imprisonment. No one argues that Maye shot Jones to death, but
the circumstances of the shooting are disputed, and that makes
all the difference as to whether Jones should be vilified as
a "cop killer" or was acting in justified self-defense.
Before going on with the story, I will say that had it not
been for Radley Balko of Reason Magazine, few people would
have known about this case and Maye could still have been headed
for the execution chamber. Balko began to write about it on his
own blog, The Agitator, and has written much about it elsewhere.
If there is a hero in this sorry tale, it is Balko. Since his
writings first appeared, people on the right and left have picked
up on it and made it more public, although it has not received
the publicity of other racially-charged cases, such as those
of the "Jena Six," and no one has marched for Cory
Maye.
Unlike some of the defendants in Jena, however, Maye had no
criminal record the night police burst into his home as he was
asleep in his living room, his 18-month daughter sleeping in
the bedroom. He was awakened early in the morning by a pounding
at his door, and ran into the child's bedroom to grab a pistol
he kept for protection.
The pounding continued, and Maye took a position lying on
the floor, when the bedroom door burst in and Maye fired
three times. Two shots hit Jones' bullet-proof vest, but one
went into Jones' abdomen, and he later died of the wound.
According to Maye, he had no idea that the intruders were
police, who had been given the address by an informant, a rather
seedy character from Prentiss who makes money by being a police
informant. Will Grigg describes the informant in the following
way:
Prentiss, Mississippi resident Randy Gentry is described by
Balko as "a 51-year-old guy with white hair pulled back
into a ponytail [and] a long, white beard...." He also wears
glasses, but not for reading, because he's illiterate, which
is a tragedy.
There are many decent and generous people from the Deep South
who meet that description. Gentry is not among them. He appears
to be a professional parasite, a drug user who occasionally works
as a "confidential informant" when the local branch
of the Leviathan State's police apparatus wants to conduct a
no-knock drug raid. Gentry has performed that service on many
occasions.
However, as noted earlier, Maye did not have a criminal record
and did not have a reputation as either a drug user or dealer.
(Police did find a smidgen of marijuana in the house -- a misdemeanor
amount at most -- but there was no huge "stash" of
pot that police had been told was there.) He was a young man
in the wrong place on the wrong end of yet another police home
invasion based on an informant's lie, something that is all-too-common
in this country today.
Maye's Troubling Trial
Prosecutors indicted Maye for first-degree capital murder.
Balko writes:
Under Mississippi law, if Maye knew or should have known that
Ron Jones was a police officer before he fired his gun, he is
guilty of capital murder. If there is reasonable doubt about
his knowledge that Jones was a police officer, he is not guilty
(although one could conceivably make a case for criminal negligence
if it can be shown he should have exercised more judgment before
firing).
The most obvious argument in Maye's defense involves the simplest
interpretation of events. A man with no criminal record is awakened
by the sounds of someone breaking into his home. While he is
lying in the dark with his daughter, the door to the bedroom
flies open and someone jumps inside. Fearing for his life, the
man fires in self-defense and kills the intruder.
To convict Maye, the jury had to believe, beyond a reasonable
doubt, that a man with no criminal record, a man who had just
moved out of his parents' home to make a life with his daughter
and girlfriend, a man who had only a minuscule amount of marijuana
in his apartment, looked out the window to see a team of police
officers was about to enter; decided to take them on, even though
he had done nothing wrong; waited for them to forcibly enter
his home; fired three shots, killing just one of them; and then
surrendered, leaving four bullets still in his gun.
Yet, a jury convicted him, but not without misconduct on behalf
of prosecutor Buddy McDonald. As Balko points out:
The evidence against Cory Maye isn't just weak. Some of it
was presented at trial in a manner that was downright misleading.
The prosecution's forensics case is one example.
Mississippi's forensic pathology system is, in the words of
one medical examiner I spoke with, "a mess." The state
has no official examiners. Instead, prosecutors solicit them
from a pool of vaguely official private practitioners to perform
autopsies in homicide cases. Steven Hayne, who performed the
autopsy on Jones, appears to be a favorite. In the words of Leroy
Reddick, a respected medical examiner in Alabama, "Every
prosecutor in Mississippi knows that if you don't like the results
you got from an autopsy, you can always take the body to Dr.
Hayne." Defense attorneys in the state bristle at Hayne's
name. In a case last year in Starkville, he testified that he
could tell by the wounds in a corpse that there were two hands
on the gun that fired the bullet, consistent with the prosecution's
theory that a man and his sister team jointly pulled the trigger.
Several medical examiners have told me such a claim is preposterous.
Hayne testified at Maye's trial that he is "board certified"
in forensic pathology, but he isn't certified by the American
Board of Pathology, the only organization recognized by the National
Association of Medical Examiners and the American Board of Medical
Specialties as capable of certifying forensic pathologists. According
to depositions from other cases, Hayne failed the American Board
of Pathology exams when he left halfway through, deeming the
questions "absurd." Instead, his C.V. indicates that
he's certified by two organizations, one of which (the American
Board of Forensic Pathology) isn't recognized by the American
Board of Medical Specialties. The other (the American Academy
of Forensic Examiners) doesn't seem to exist. Judging from his
testimony in other depositions, it's likely Hayne meant to list
the American College of Forensic Examiners. According to Hayne,
the group certified him through the mail based on "life
experience," with no examination at all. Several forensics
experts described the American College of Forensic Examiners
to me as a "pay your money, get your certification"
organization. A February 2000 article in the American Bar
Association Journal makes similar allegations, with one psychologist
who was certified through the group saying, "Everything
was negotiable -- for a fee."
Hayne's testimony was critical in securing Maye's conviction.
Hayne said he could tell from the damage to Jones' body the trajectory
the bullet took as it entered the officer. Based on that trajectory,
he speculated that Maye was standing when he shot Jones, not
lying on the floor, as Maye testified. Hayne's testimony seriously
damaged Maye's credibility with the jury.
But according to a post-trial review by an actual, board-certified
forensics expert whom Maye's new legal team hired, it would be
impossible to project the bullet's trajectory based on the tissue
damage in Jones' corpse, because Jones might have been crouching,
rolling, or prone when he was hit. Furthermore, the hole created
in the bedroom door frame by one of the three bullets Maye fired
that night clearly slants upward, from about shoulder height.
The prosecution ignored a bullet hole in a fixed object that
was consistent with Maye's account of the raid and instead pushed
Hayne's testimony about the supposed trajectory of a bullet that
struck a moving object.
As Balko has noted elsewhere, Hayne has been the perfect pathologist
for police and prosecutors, as he has the reputation of testifying
in any way necessary for a conviction. Yet, Hayne operates with
what one charitably would call unorthodox methods:
Hayne has repeatedly testified under oath that he performs
more than 1,500 autopsies per year a staggering number
that dwarfs even the output of the prolific Dr. Erdmann. That's
more than four per day, every day of the year, for the 20 years
Hayne's been in Mississippi. In a 2002 deposition, Hayne put
the estimate at 1,800.
What's more, for most of his career, Hayne also has held jobs
as medical director of the Rankin Medical Center (a post he left
last summer) and as director of the Renal Lab, a kidney and dialysis
research center. These jobs, he has testified, would take up
about 55 hours per week of his time, hours not spent performing
the 30 to 35 autopsies he says he does each week. (A typical
autopsy should take two to three hours, but sometimes takes an
entire day, depending on the condition of the body and cause
of death.) Hayne has said in depositions that he also testifies
"two to three to four times per week," all across Mississippi
and occasionally in Louisiana.
How does he find the time? In his testimony, Hayne has claimed
he "commonly" works 18 to 20 hours per day. He says
he doesn't take vacations, and works every weekend and every
holiday.
Until recently, Hayne performed most of his autopsies not
at the state lab in Jackson but at Mississippi Mortuary Services,
a funeral home owned by Jimmy Roberts, the longtime Rankin County
coroner. Hayne and a few trusted assistants do most of his autopsies
late at night, and the operation has a gruesome reputation. People
who have visited Hayne's practice during an autopsy session have
described seeing as many as 15 bodies opened at once, with Hayne
and his assistants smoking cigars, sometimes even eating sandwiches,
as they go from one body to the next. Critics interviewed for
this article, none of them particularly squeamish about autopsies
performed under normal conditions, referred to Hayne's operation
as a "slaughterhouse," a "sushi shop," and
a "sausage factory."
Dwayne Wolf, a doctor who works for the Harris County Medical
Examiner's Office in Houston, had occasion to review one of Hayne's
autopsies when he was practicing in Alabama. "Dr. Hayne's
deficiencies are glowingly obvious when you review his work,"
Wolf says. "There were a lot of things done in a substandard
way."
Harry Bonnell, a medical examiner in private practice in San
Diego who sits on NAME's (National Association of Medical Examiners)
ethics board, was asked by a defense attorney to review an autopsy
Hayne performed in 2003 on a suspected murder victim. Bonnell
was floored by Hayne's conclusions. Using unusually strong language,
Bonnell said Hayne's conclusions were "near-total speculation,"
the quality of his report was "pathetic," and Hayne's
failure to obtain specimens from the body and perform toxicology
reports "borders on criminal negligence."
(As a side note, I would add that we should not be surprised
when government authorities openly seek and then champion something
like fraudulent forensic examinations, especially since most
jurors do not know the science of forensics. Once it has become
apparent that prosecutors are seeking convictions over the truth,
then it should follow logically that they will employ fraudulent
methods whenever they think they need help to garner convictions.)
Unfortunately, Maye's family pulled a huge blunder. Instead
of hiring the local public defender, Bob Evans, who was convinced
of Maye's innocence, they hired a black female attorney from
Jackson who told them she had death penalty experience (according
to the family) when, in fact, she did not.
The attorney's first step was fatal. She demanded and
received a change of venue from Jefferson to Lamar counties.
Jefferson County is 57 percent black, while Lamar is 85 percent
white, and tends to be dominated politically by white, law-and-order
Republicans, the very kind of people who always will believe
a police officer's testimony, and especially a white officer's
testimony against a black defendant who had a tiny bit of marijuana
in his home.
The prosecution's response was that of "please don't
throw me in the briar patch," as it all but guaranteed victory
for the state, even after a judge permitted a second move, this
time to another Republican-dominated location, Marion County.
Writes Balko:
In an area where race and class figure so prominently in public
and private life, Cooper's (Maye's attorney) mistake was devastating.
"The best the prosecution would have gotten in Jefferson
Davis County is a hung jury," Evans says. "There's
just no way a majority-black jury would have come back with death
with those facts." (The jury that convicted Maye consisted
of 10 whites and two blacks.)
Jurors heard not only a dishonest prosecution (just the Hayne
testimony alone was enough to shatter Maye's credibility and
lead the jury to convict), but also a defense attorney who later
was ruled to be incompetent by a judge during an appeal. Given
those circumstances, it is not surprising that the jury came
back with its verdict. The battle to overturn the actual conviction
is uphill, to say the least, and Maye must deal with the hard
truth that facts and evidence are unimportant in U.S. courts
these days, as judges tend to be obsessed with gaining "finality"
and demonstrating reluctance to overturn juries, no matter how
outrageous their verdicts might be.
The Continuing Tragedy
Unfortunately, the same system that has ground Cory Maye into
the dirt marches on. Networks like FOX glamorize these home invasions
(called raids) on television shows, and TV newscasters jump at
the chance of accompanying police in order to film the sorry
results. As Will Grigg writes:
The worst and most troubling version of "reality"
television programs are those chronicling the experiences of
law enforcement agencies the decades-old Fox program
"COPS" and its imitators, one of which is Dallas
SWAT (which has engendered its own regional spin-offs, as
well).
Police work is carried out by armed people invested with the
power to commit discretionary lethal violence; it's a monumentally
bad idea to appeal to the vanity of such people and to encourage
them to act in ways calculated to enhance their image.
"Reality" programs involving police tend to emphasize
photogeneity over professionalism, not only in terms of the personnel
chosen to represent a given department but also in terms of the
decisions made in a given situation. Chases and confrontations
make for dramatic television; patient de-escalation does not.
A simple knock at the door by Ron Jones during a daylight
hour would have yielded the same drug haul that the fatal home
invasion produced. The difference is that Jones, who by all accounts
was well-liked in his community by people of all races, would
be alive today and Cory Maye would be a free man pursuing his
own life.
Instead, the insistence by government authorities to use deadly
force where none is needed has meant that countless people are
dead and lives are ruined forever. Once again, we see that the
state has the power to kill and destroy, and wields that power
recklessly even though we know beyond a doubt that simple restraint
would yield results that do not end in violence, bloodshed, death,
and imprisonment. That fact, however, is unacceptable to those
who have life-and-death authority over the rest of us.
William L. Anderson, Ph.D., teaches economics at Frostburg
State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the
Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American
Economic Services.
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